jane bennett’s influential text
TRANSCRIPT
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Jane Bennett’s influential text Vibrant Matter
proposes a radical political ecology that encourages us to attend to matter, to “thingly
power,” not as an inert or passive backdrop against which human activity is set, but as
vested with lively intensities and productive forces that both inform and elude us. Bennett
positions her work as pursuing a materialist axis following Democritus, Epicurus, and
Spinoza—one which understands matter as expressive, participatory, recalcitrant, and
capable of commanding human attention by way of its own generative propensities. In the
process, Bennett challenges received conceptions regarding the ontological primacy of
humans and works to de-partition traditional onto-theological binaries (life/matter,
human/animal, organic/inorganic). While she concedes that analyses of power relations
operative in the human realm are important for exposing social hegemony and unravelling
political inequality across human subjects, her account suggests we “bracket the question
of the human” and ask whether expanding our political arena to include matter and
nonhuman things after their long tenure of exile from the fora of human affairs can
meaningfully redirect our political responses to ecological crises in particular (ix).
The political status and stakes of Bennett’s vital materiality are debateable. On the
one hand, the investment in thing-power is an ontologically diversifying perspective that
succeeds in encouraging us to attend more meaningfully to non-human forces. However,
by investing in the power of matter-in-itself, new materialist discourses like Bennett’s
often signal a problematic disinvestment from the study of social power relations that
constrain and animate human life, and which remain pressingly determinative and
unresolved in the realm of the human. This skepticism is well-documented in the scholarly
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response to new materialism. Do ontologies that decenter the fraught histories of the
subject overlook or disregard the materiality of race and gender in particular? Do they fail
to negotiate visions of human praxis that are inclusive of social and historical
dimensionalities to their detriment, especially those coming out of feminist, queer, and
queer of color critique? There is also the fact that Bennett does not engage long-standing
Indigenous philosophies to which some “new” materialisms bear considerable
resemblance. And as we will see, even while self-situating her project within a particular
western philosophical tradition, her conclusions under-negotiate potential criticisms that
can be mounted from within that very paradigm—whether the insistence on relational
profusion suppresses the question of difference and renders generic and generalized the
human gaze, for instance, or the implicit assumption that such a new materialist approach,
in impressing upon material immediacy, can correct or circumvent problems that reside at
the level of language and representation.
One available response is to say that it is not clear that an expressly “thing”-centered
project should be critiqued for its failure to treat the subject-oriented dimensions of
contemporary politics in a complete or exhaustive manner. Perhaps it violates the terms
of Bennett’s text to assess it on the basis of what escapes its purview—by reintroducing
questions of race, gender, and Indigeneity, for instance, which Bennett’s account
consciously sets aside in favor of a matter-attentive materialism. However, the
presumption that we are only authorized to question a text on its own terms rather than
impose our particular demands on it—what Alfred J. López calls proceeding by way of a
“dialectics of permission”—may well continue to stunt the growth of new materialist work
like Bennett’s, especially when such tensions have proven productive, helping to open up
and meaningfully redirect future research in the field.1 In addition to asking what is left out
of such discourses, one should ask what they impart or import—whether most new
materialisms (in their ontological protraction that lumps human beings in with a wider
array of active materiality) spring out of a sort of theoretical luxury (inevitably connected
1 López, Alfred J. “Contesting the Material Turn; or, the Persistence of Agency.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 5(3), September 2018, pp. 372.
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to comforts not-merely-theoretical) or else out of a brand of relational utopianism
whereby humans are “at bottom” more materially and relationally akin than divergent and
thus can be called to redirect their unitary attention to nonhuman materials. Without
exercising blanket disapprobation here and understanding that theoretical projects do not
always align due to deviating stakes and incentives that veer into unsquareable territory
(such as the commitment to a de- or pre-socialized metaphysics versus the belief in its
impossibility), it is worth considering what set of idyllic investments or intellectual
pacifisms are required to look over an empirical history of antagonism in order to seize
upon the project of radicalizing ontology by deference to things, as though it is a more
critical or foundational project than thinking through what Jordy Rosenberg calls “the
dynamics of social mediation” at the level of the human—“the intersections of race,
gender, sexuality, and class [that] constitute social formations within liberal capitalism.” 2
Herein lies a rub that continues to disclose itself in the contemporary theoretical literature
in the humanities, to be sure, and beyond. Whether or not a case can be made for their
reconciliation, the division between anthropocentric and non- or post-anthropocentric
methods of approach remains a focal and contentious problem.
Bennett’s philosophy does not consider the empirical or material subject-positions
and conditions that make a philosophy such as hers entertainable for some and
unthinkable for others from the outset. While to adopt the approach advocated in Vibrant
Matter is to presume that one can rewrite ontology after centuries of experiencing
subjective embodiment in disproportionate and historically-laden ways, this is naturally
not the case for all theorists working in a neo-materialist vein. Rosi Braidotti’s neo-
materialist posthumanism, for instance, balances a critique of anthropocentrism with a
critical response to the afterlives of humanism as informed by anti-colonial and feminist
discourses, keeping abreast the importance of incorporating “situated epistemologies”
after Haraway.3 And Mel Y. Chen writes questions of race and queerness into their
2 Rosenberg, Jordana. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory & Event, 17(2), 2014. 3 See Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. New York: Polity Press, 2019.
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materialist premises from the outset, rather than appealing to pre-socialized ontological
categories.4 Against pre- or de-socialized ontology, we might think also of Denise Ferreira
da Silva’s work, which takes as given what I suggest later: that many ontological accounts
fail to recognize the way epistemological presumption saturates so-called primary or
formal categories, thereby disrupting the possibility of positing a flat, non-hierarchical,
evacuated formalism, a primary “fundamental” ontology through which we can think
relationality, posture, agency, or forms of being irrespective of historically-inflected,
enfleshed subjectivities. Da Silva points out the “impossibility of separating ontology and
epistemology in modern thought,” implicitly casting doubt on the projects mounted by
Bennett as well as speculative realist philosophies like OOO. Fred Moten’s
counterhegemonic social conception of ontology has also been seen to function as a
remedy to the exclusions that shape the ontological and material turns evinced by Bennett
and others.5 Such discourses suggest that perhaps everything is artifact, including our so-
called constitutive or antecedent metaphysical categories. Important philosophical and
political questions arise from these considerations. To what extent is an interventionist
metaphysics possible? Or: is there such a thing as a “new” metaphysics that can neglect or
circumvent a treatment of its own social, political, or historical coming-to-be?6
While a number of new materialist discourses need to respond thoughtfully to
these many interventions, my aim here will be to meet Bennett’s vital materialism where
it is (even if that means I subscribe in this instance to the dialectics of permission López is
wary of) and to ask whether such a position cashes out on the distinct ontological grounds
it sets out from. If we are as generous as Bennett often is in her response to proponents
and critics of vibrant materiality alike, and we assume that the socio-political stakes of her
project in Vibrant Matter are robust and meaningful, what should an ontology inclusive of
nonhuman species and matter look like? I will argue that even before questions concerning
whether Bennett’s vital materialism can effectively treat what some strains of new
4 Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 5 See Rosenberg, Jordana. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory & Event, 17(2), 2014. 6 See Harman, Graham and Latour, Bruno, eds. “New Metaphysics” Series. Open Humanities Press, 2011-2020.
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materialist study neglect—such as those queries coming out of queer theory, critical race
theory, feminist analyses, bio/necropolitics, historical materialist tracts, and so on—there
are questions concerning method, epistemological allegiances, and philosophical
presumption at play in Bennett that compromise from the start the overarching thrust of
her project (to highlight the “nonhuman powers circulating around and within human
bodies” [ix]).
I will examine 1) how Bennett’s terminological shift from “objects” to “things” is not
reflected at the level of her political ecology beyond an insistence on the latter over the
former, and 2) how Bennett’s plan to “bracket the human” in favor of a vibrant materialist
analysis is performed through the reintroduction of a universalized human subject—a
projective and organizing consciousness—that operates “ontologically” via pre-proposed
epistemological affinities (2, viii). I suggest that Bennett’s account is not radical enough in
leaving a place for alterity in the spheres of the non-human or material, and therefore that
her account does not philosophically invest in the unknowable power of things that it
celebrates. Throughout, I argue for why a radical alterity must be central to an ecological,
vitalist, or object-oriented ontology, in order that these discourses do not effectively
reinstall the appropriative human ecologies, terminologies, and epistemologies they aim
to displace.
From “Objects” to “Things”
Bennett’s terminological shift from objects as described by W.J.T. Mitchell (“the way things
appear to a subject”) to things (taken from Foucault’s metaphysics of the object—“a
metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up”) is meant to
illuminate the pivot made by her political ecology as a whole (2). And yet, Vibrant Matter
does not get away from observing things in the style of the object as defined above.
Bennett advocates for an approach to matter as “a culture of things irreducible to the
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culture of objects,” even while she negotiates the culture of things through object-culture
(things as viewed, arranged, and affectively defined by a mediative subject) (5).
In the first chapter of Vibrant Matter, Bennett supplements for the brand of realism
that insists on matter’s recalcitrance, and deviates from what Meillassoux calls
“correlationism”7 by suggesting that matter does not merely persist in resisting human
manipulations but also displays a vital force that includes the ability to initiate or produce
effects. In developing her concept of thing-power, Bennett merges the Spinozist conatus,
the Thoreauean “Wild,” and Hent de Vries’s “absolute” into one critical nexus.
While Spinoza thinks much less of the capacity of animals and things to wield power
as compared with human reason’s self-perfecting, deeply affective, and more powerfully
modifiying nature, he does grant (after Aristotle) that “any thing whatsoever” strives, in
the aim to preserve its own being.8 Bennett here hopes to illustrate how human- and/as
thing-bodies “form alliances and enter assemblages” and sees this agency as “distributed
across an ontologically heterogeneous field”; bodies interact in ways congregative, rather
than hierarchically or as the product of human effort (22-3).9 The Thoreauean Wild is
described as “an uncanny presence… a not-quite-human force that addle[s] and alter[s]
human and other bodies… an irreducibly strange dimension of matter, an outside” (3). The
“absolute” of de Vries refers to “an intangible and imponderable recalcitrance” that resists
representation and refuses to be dissolved by human knowledge (3). Respectively, these
three elements of thing-power serve to 1) dissolve into an equivalence the differently
expressed but similarly striving conative power of both human and non-human entities, 2)
establish the agential action of things on other things as well as on the world of the human,
7 See Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. New York: Continuum, 2008. 8 Benedict de Spinoza. “Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions.” Ethics. Edwin Curley, trans. London: Penguin, 1996. 9 Bennett does say that her monism is, after Deleuze, "ontologically one, formally diverse." She argues that all things exhibit a natural tendency to strive and so sees what she calls “variable” materialities as ontologically one with respect to the broadly distributed power across all things even as they “morph, evolve, disintegrate” (VM xi). In this case things are not, for her “strangely strange all the way down” as they are for object-oriented ontologists like Timothy Morton; they are all equally “striving” at bottom (Morton, Timothy. “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology.” Qui Parle, 19(2), Spring/Summer, 2011, p. 184).
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and 3) foreclose the human capacity to wholly know the non-representable uncanniness of
things (an exercise in epistemological modesty).
The catch is that such an insistence on the obdurate unknowability of things would
not provide Bennett sufficient grounds to evaluate or observe with any authority the
operations of those things—an activity her text is very much invested in. Bennett’s move is
thus to restrain the “absolute,” scaling it down to a “vibrant matter,” which bakes thing-
wildness into a much more ontologically-accessible pie. She calls de Vries’s abeyance to an
epistemological limit an anthropocentric impulse and reproaches de Vries for
“overlook[ing] things and what they can do,” when he is in fact resisting that we can know
in any complete way what things do even if we hoped to look (3). Keeping abreast a de
Vriesean investment in the absolute would not necessarily entail the decimation of thing-
power, but it would radicalize its inaccessibility, and thereby compromise the possibility
for a robust account of its activity. Thus, Bennett makes more modest thing-power’s
autonomous thinglyness, since acknowledging the utterly-ungraspable, noumenal, or
radical dehiscence of things would ultimately complicate her account (she would be forced
to tarry with the fact of philosophical foreclosure rather than project imaginatively by way
of “speculative onto-stor[ies]” [4]). Unfortunately, this modification permits her to hyper-
anthropomorphize in the aim of evading anthropocentric self-concern. Bennett’s
purported movement from epistemology to that of ontology is thus an effort that relies on
opening back up the epistemological possibilities that “the absolute” foreclosed. Having
cleared the ground for speculative operations, the bulk of her book goes on to describe
matter’s intrinsic vitality—a practice that revolves around thing-power as framed by
human affect, experiences, and voicings of these objects, as seen through the lens of what
things provoke and promote for the arguably still-centralized human “I” (3). Bennett’s
philosophy thus tries to have it both ways with respect to its onto-epistemological
foregrounding—it postulates epistemological impossibility as well as a categoried,
anthropocentric metaphysics to frame and delineate that impossibility.
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The Universalized Human Gaze
Tracking with still-active trends in postcritique, Bennett is wary of the hermeneutics of
suspicion and its attachment to processes of demystification. Her resistance to
demystification is not a wholesale condemnation of demystification as a critical tool, but
the fact that it proves to be useful only when we seek to uncover the traces and projections
of human agency. It is a human tool that uncovers human motivations and manipulations
by way of captious critique, and is thus not of use if what we hope to uncover is the
affirmative autonomy of thing-power. Bennett thus claims to jettison a demystifying
impulse, which she sees as predominantly afoot in human projects that work to disclose
the operations of hegemony—approaches that “screen from view the vitality of matter and
reduce political agency to human agency” (xvi). And yet, she similarly exhibits a
demystifying gesture by imputing (or “finding”) a shared conatic striving across humans
and things, arguably reducing thing-power to one type of familiar power, demystifying and
disclosing its formal essence.
Bennett’s descriptions of thing-power’s ability “to exceed their status as objects
and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness” are drawn from the human
experience of that independence, delightfully recounted. She describes things as having
“protean agency,” as being “resistan[t],” as “rich,” and “complex”—delivering things with
haste back to their status as objects as they appear for us (13, 11). Nowhere is this plainer
than in her appraisal of a thing-assemblage encountered in a storm drain grate to
Chesapeake Bay:
“Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick… stuff to ignore,... and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded
attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings,
habits, or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even
if I did not quite understand what it was saying. At the very least, it provoked affects in me: I was
repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but I also felt
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something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that
configuration of pollen… the ‘excruciating complexity and intractability’ of nonhuman bodies,
but, in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive
‘intractability’ but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects. When
the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer
and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other,
with the street, with the weather that morning, with me… and so I caught a glimpse of an
energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this
assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the
contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics. In
my encounter with the gutter on Cold Spring Lane, I glimpsed a culture of things irreducible to the
culture of objects” (4-5, emphases mine).
Here the independence of things relies on a formulating human consciousness to configure
its autonomy. If we take Bennett at her word and think thing-power while we “bracket the
human,” who or what in this excerpt is experiencing these objects as such (as energetically
vital, “vivid,” “disclosing themselves as dead” while nonetheless “alive”)? We still have the
classifying human being in full swing, needed to insist upon the objective vibrancy of rats
and gloves. The human is not bracketed except with respect to its history, its
differentiations, its varied investments. The de-situated human consciousness is
universalized, sublimated into an objective gaze in order to decree that thingness is
inarguably invested with power, vitality, accessible-inaccessibility. In the process, matter
is never granted real autonomy but remains shackled to human faculties and relegated to
the fatalism of address.
Bennett’s onto-story’s choice of a particular road, a particular street in Baltimore
(which is named only to aesthetically localize the quotidian encounter, not to socially
contextualize the sightings) abstracts away from the sociological factors that might be
relevant to how different subjects would attend to those objects and in all likelihood derive
divergent meanings from them. López notes that the items Bennett celebrates may well
appear as less vital, intractable, and disclosing if viewed by a subject harboring a different
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perspective, a different affective propulsion, “an-Other gaze” (377). Bennett’s
characterization of matter succeeds in both universalizing a particular gaze (presumably a
white, middle/upper class, academic gaze) while abstracting away from contextual factors
that might account for or alter it. The lack of attunement to socio-political systems of
power through which things appear and through which subjects are differentiated
forecloses rich and diverse readings of that same assemblage while popularizing the notion
that what is gleaned by one observer exposes in full the vibrant truth of things.
You will notice that my critique so far has been vacillating between two strains. The
first strain goes as follows: to make a claim about matter not just as vibrant but as
experienceable, perceivable, and legible as such is to introduce not just an agential human
but an affected, experientially-modified one. This means one must thereby account for the
discrepancies across human subjects. The universalized gaze imported, at this level, entails
that subjects are not treated in their variability (which is ironic as matter is read as highly
variable, creating an imbalance across acting entities).
This critique of Bennett tracks alongside discourses concerned with the state of the
subject as a highly variable and unstable category—those that insist we treat subjects in
their constellative and differential materialities, and, crucially, in their disproportionate
agential power. Alexander Weheliye in Habeas Viscus, for instance, cautions that we
remain suspicious of the “disavowal of subjectivity in theoretical discourse,” which often
encodes a desire to transcend particular critical categories, like race, to which we can add
other critical categories—such as gender, class, sexual identity, etc. (48).10 If Bennett
disavowed an investment in the subject outright, it might be more possible to read her
charitably as not invested in subject discourses and so less susceptible to critiques at this
level. However, such critiques can be made from within Bennett’s materialist ontology, as
she herself reinstalls a subject-centered narrative in order to decipher matter’s qualities
and volitions. Bennett argues that discerning and attending to the mattering of the
mattered world over constructivist ontologies of the human and its correlative, nonhuman
10 Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
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Others involves an active attempt to “elide the question of the human” (120).11 But the
argument of the text as a whole relies on this human subject as the unit through which the
text’s concerns are focalized. And yet, this subject is a bare and unconvincing one—one
uninflected by difference, universalized in its engagement with materiality, reliably
motivated, already-invested in a vision of materiality as vibrant and active and necessarily
worthy of our attention.12
The second strain of critique goes as follows: the belief in thing-power beyond
human reach is a modest view that is only supportable if Bennett had resisted the urge to
populate and characterize this unknowability. This is where I think Bennett requires an
abeyance to a type of radical alterity13 or unknowability to properly preserve the autonomy
of thing-power. We have thus taken issue with Bennett’s imputation of a particular subject
as the general subject, as well as with her ontological concession to the unknowability of
matter that then is named and demystified through the flexings of epistemological
presumption.
11 López notes that the connection between the neglect of matter as “dead” or “inert” and the historical treatment of human Others as “things” viable for human exploitation is overlooked by Bennett, even as it contains the seeds of what might be a crucial overlap between vibrant materialism and critical race and gender theory. Weheliye opens the door for a brand of new materialism, argues López, which incorporates subjects as defined by racialized assemblages, and that keeps abreast a history while offering a more expansive vision of affect that incorporates one’s feeling of race (384). This is a view of enfleshed immersion (drawn from Wynter and Spillers) that, if materialist, is not merely materialist, and is certainly not materialist in the way a number of new materialisms are that advocate for desocialized ontologies. In any case, we see the way that reading against new materialist discourses can forge a direction for sympathizers of new materialisms like Bennett’s who are troubled by its omissions, which may well propel novel future queries borne out of (amended) new materialist allegiances. 12 In trying to departition humanist binaries and leave aside the question of the human, Bennett reinstalls a monolithic human subject, so sabotaging any anti-humanist theoretical effort on her part. By contrast, anthropocentric anti-humanist discourses (especially those out of black studies) similarly work against humanist myths of rational Man’s enlightened domination by way of an explicit critique of the humanist human and the reimagining of human futures. See Wynter, da Silva, Weheliye. 13 Alterity is a term freighted with the residues of a long western philosophical tradition (and perhaps should be replaced with new terminologies or articulations, as Jack Halberstam suggests [see Posthuman Glossary, Maria Hlavajova and Rosi Braidotti, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 171]). For the moment, alterity in my sense is not poised to insist upon or reinforce the human/nonhuman divide but rather radicalizes, with an eye to ethical engagement, unknowability—our restricted epistemological access to others and things, regardless of their human or non-human status, such that we do not populate with projection that to which we have incomplete knowledge—it is, in essence, a Kantian restraint of sorts, but one applied not only to a particular, over-reaching species but one that perforates all engagement, even inter-human arrangements, while not rendering impossible interaction or relation.
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The Absolute Alterity of the Neighbor
Bennett in some ways anticipates our critique by acknowledging the danger of describing
thing-power such that the independence of objects might be lost and wonders what
methodology is capable of such a task. She suggests at least two antidotes. One is to
accept that philosophy has at least as much to do with play as with reason and to embrace
what Adorno called our “clownish traits”—to approach matter knowing that we will never
have complete access to it, that it is beyond the sphere of our control, but to engage it
anyway and be willing “to appear naïve or foolish” before it. The negative dialectician
knows he cannot experience non-identity, “and yet he must always talk as if he had it
entirely” to better entertain speculative engagements with it, to engage that non-identity
by way of a sort of doltish dialectic (15). Another way, which is in some ways an extension
or recasting of the first, is to forsake a dogged anthropocentrism while seeing one’s
anthropomorphic tendencies as a potential aid to help rethink matter as both recalcitrant
and empowered: “We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism—the idea that human
agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature—to counter the narcissism of humans in
charge of the world” (xvi). Leaving aside that the first of these licenses the human
narcissism that the second subverts, and leaving aside that humans are “in charge of the
world” to varying degrees (here is an instance of the universalized human we have
discussed), there is also something very compelling about this claim. Because we cannot
experience anything except as humans, we cannot extend a sense of autonomy or agency
to matter unless we presuppose that its autonomy or agency looks and feels something
like our own. This may be our only (problematic) way of affirming thing-power. However,
does this willful anthropomorphism “catalyze a sensibility” that means we see the world as
filled with complex and entangled materiality rather than ontologically distinct categories
of beings, as Bennett suggests, or does it get us to a world where one brand of human
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agency perforates all nonhuman life, overwriting even the possibility of inaccessible
matter and reinstalling a vision of the world-as-all-legible to human actants?
Bennett hopes in Vibrant Matter to “follow Derrida,” and by extension to follow the
nonhuman (the animal in Derrida’s terms) in order to think through our relational
limitations and inhibitions.14 She draws out the relationship Derrida notes between being
and following, such that to be is also to be following, to be responding to the call of
something, human or not. This insight helps to frame the attention to vibrant matter as a
response to thingly agency rather than a projection of human agency onto things.
However, Bennett stops short of pursuing Derrida by abandoning the focal
phenomenological tract aimed at negotiating alterity. Derrida’s “The Animal Therefore
That I Am” is not only about “following” the long-neglected animal to uncover new
avenues for relational inquiry, as Bennett suggests. Derrida also interrogates the gaze of
the human, its projection onto the gaze of the animal-other, and the anthropomorphic
transference that changes a radically unsubordinateable other into a human instrument or
appendage—both an extension of our own gaze and embodied feelings of shame, as well
as tools for our use, consumption, and disposal. Derrida leaves space for the alterity of the
animal, which we can read as an analogue for the alterity of things or objects.15 His
attention to the animal is a decisive ethical, philosophical, and political gesture: “Nothing
can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that
refuses to be conceptualized” (379). The animal gaze for Derrida is a “bottomless gaze”
that incites an apocalyptic response in the gazed-at human. It marks the “abyssal limit of
the human” (381). We thus get two abysses: the explicit one that stands between man and
animal and marks the “ends of man,” and the other, I suggest, is the bottomless gaze of
the animal itself, which localizes for Derrida “the absolute alterity of the neighbor” (380).
The alterity of the gaze is crucial to an ethics begun out of a respect for distinct and
14 See Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry, 28, Winter 2002. 15 Derrida makes clear that the problem with the monolithic nomination of “animal” is that it gathers into it all types of creatures differentially unknowable, a critique that parallels mine re: Bennett’s universalized “human” obliterating all differences across distinct human beings.
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unrelegatable beings, but it also results in an aesthetic and affective evaluation of oneself
and one’s own gaze, as performed by Derrida’s auto-affective piece that faces both inward
and outward. We can here note some limited compatibilities between Derrida on animality
and object-oriented ontology (OOO), to better gesture towards competing views of
alterity within and beyond Bennett, as active in the theoretical literature today. Beyond a
mutual respect for radical or “fully-withdrawn” alterity, both Derrida and OOO invest in
the decentering of the subject or the enlargement of the world to include human and
nonhuman beings in their inaccessible strangeness. Both posit the being-before-ness of
nonhuman being—the animal is before us, says Derrida, it is we who follow after it, which
is a way of saying that nonhuman things do not emerge out of acting or in contact with
human categories—they exist before our conceptual and linguistic representation of them,
and they precede and subsist apart from our gaze (380). Similarly, human beings are all
equally objects among other objects for OOO, and the peculiarity of human objects does
not warrant their primacy or justify their dominion.16 Derrida’s account exercises discretion
in thinking about dormant, fully withdrawn objects and less withdrawn, relational ones, by
phrasing these different economies of separation in terms of “neighborliness,” as that
which is more or less far from us as we experience it, determined by our human ability to
commune and identify with a thing or not. We can thus recognize that there is a difference
for us between encountering a cat and say, an ant, but Derrida nonetheless advocates for
a recognition of living things that acknowledges neighborly nearness or farness without it
becoming a site to premise either identity or neglect.
Derrida’s treatment of the animal exhibits something like a politics or ethics of
concession—a recognition that the incapacity to know the unknowable other is not
resolved by our overreaching and mostly failing anthropomorphic tendencies. A study for
16 Of course, there are also unsquareable differences between the two approaches, mostly revolving around the problem of language and representation, insurmountable for Derrida but not for OOO. Graham Harman critiques deconstruction and philosophies of difference as still resulting in subject-fetishization and a view of objects as unstable and without identity, wherein “the object is treated as nothing more than the grammatical superstition of traditionalist dupes, drugged by the opiate of noun/verb Western grammar” (Harman, Graham. “On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Eds. Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek & Graham Harman, re.press: 2011, p. 23-4).
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another day would be to flesh out how a politics of concession can be a precept widened
beyond our engagement with the animal or with vibrant matter, such that it reconnects
with politics at the level of the human. Such an approach would recognize that we cannot
experience the non-human non-anthropomorphically, that we cannot think intent or affect
or motivation beyond a human sensibility, that we will forever be entangled in the enigmas
of representation and language in trying to meet that unknowability—but also, crucially, it
would recognize that these quandaries do not only apply to things or animals but also to
the relationships between human beings, who similarly approach each other as other, and
in particularly antagonistic cases, as less-than-human others. There is space within such a
politics of concession to improve relations with nonhumans and humans alike. Unlike OOO
and Derrida, the latter of whom Bennett hopes to follow and the former of whom Bennett
has been in an ongoing public dialogue with,17 Bennett never gets to a politics or ethics of
concession in her undue commitment to accessing thing-power and her failure to
acknowledge alterity. In fact, as we will see, it is not clear to what extent an ethics is
available to her at all.
Sustainable Engagements
Bennett’s argument in Vibrant Matter is ultimately untenable on the level of the ontological
premises it sets out from, even while its end goal—to foster an attention to thing-power
and to promote more sustainable engagements in our increasingly ecologically vulnerable
world—is a vital one.
In the spirit of retention and resuscitation, we might say that Bennett’s strategy
works well as a generative relational philosophy rather than a recalibrated post-
anthropocentric ontology. Perhaps we are better to think of Bennett’s political ecology as
17 See for example Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History, 43(2), 2012, pp. 225-233 and Harman, Graham. “Materialism is Not the Solution: On Matter, Form, and Mimesis.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. 47, 2014, pp. 94-110.
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an anthropology of the sort that Marilyn Strathern recommends, whereby “people become
momentarily conscious both of their own centrality and of the necessity to maintain
relations with other centers on their periphery” (85).18 This is to accept that her account
mobilizes the anthropocentric orientation she wants to resist, and to return her account to
its status as a practical political ecology, which she hoped to bypass in favor of a foray into
the realm of the “ontological imaginary” (57).
I look for a more charitable and redemptive route here because I appreciate that as I
take Bennett to task for the epistemological allegiances and the vehement generalization
of the subject baked into her ontology, sea levels are rising and have been rising over the
last two decades twice as fast as they did in the century prior and that ecological disaster
is projected to generate tens of millions of climate migrants by 2050. Bennett’s account
remains attractive to us less because of its radicalizing ontology than because of its
ecocritical and environmentally-conscious sensibility. Since we cannot know thing-power
beyond our experience of it and since delineating ethical aspirations from the perspective
of vibrant matter is still to do so from the perspective of the first-person observing human,
we have shown that Bennett’s thingly ethics already reside where Bennett damningly says
the environmental discourse resides, “in the substrate of human culture” (111). An ethics
undoubtedly falls out from Bennett’s account, but it is not the ethics she intends, it is not
the ethics that “discern[s] nonhuman vitality” by bracketing the human—it is an ethics that
attends to thing-power as mobilized by the human observer’s insistence that matter is
agential in highly particular ways.
Negotiating Bennett’s argument also yields an insight that by far supersedes the
specific inner workings of Vibrant Matter. Namely, that no anti-anthropocentric account
of thingly agency can theoretically populate and characterize this agency without
reinscribing projective anthropocentric tendencies onto that agency, which necessarily
exists apart from us. Things do not only persist in frenzied networks of rabid relation, nor
is each thing separated from every other thing by unbroachable gulfs that strand objects
and others on infinitely separate, untouchable isles. This means affirming the alterity of
18 Strathern, Marilyn. Partial Connections. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
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the other—an affirmation that can be made, but which expresses (almost schematically)
the limit of what we can know—while refusing forms of conjecture that absorb alterity or
unknowability once more into the fabric of human classification. It is for this reason that
we must cultivate, in tandem, an understanding of alterity as persistent and unalterable
and, simultaneously, why we must bridle the tendency toward the epistemological
overreach that attempts to colonize, inhabit, and represent that alterity. If we have already
trespassed despite this epistemological deadlock, as Bennett has, we must work on
retreating, on intervening to evacuate from the sphere of the other our persistent
techniques of governance, to concede to alterity’s ungovernability.
Reading Bennett against Bennett in this way, as invested in human survival and
sustainability, albeit in a way more receptive to nonhuman actors, would not rehabilitate
Bennett’s project with respect to the critiques of new materialism raised by queer, anti-
colonial, and black studies scholars in particular (as seen above). This would only provide
key philosophical correctives and clarifications at the level of Bennett’s ontology.
However, resituating Vibrant Matter in its proper anthropocentric paradigm might provide
greater opportunities for contact with subject-oriented anti-humanist discourses. Without
such amendments, Bennett’s project, instead of cultivating more sustainable
engagements with vibrant matter, actually systematically subordinates the discourse of
ecological sustainability to a vibrant but paralyzed ontology, when its potential promise
(ethically and affectually) inheres in its anthropological, anthropocentric sensibilities and
its thoughtful reworking, from this standpoint, of the environmental imaginary.